The Deadhouse (4 page)

"What'd she teach?" Mike asked, moving into the room with me.

"Political science. When I first got the case and met her, she was
still on the faculty at Columbia. Had a spectacular reputation as a
scholar and a teacher. Lola was a brilliant lecturer."

I glanced at a small stack of books on her nightstand. They were all
novels rather than textbooks. I wondered whether they were favorites
she kept at hand to reread. A bookmark stuck out from the pages of the
one on top of the pile—an early Le Carre, one that Lola would never
finish.

"Students loved her because she brought the classroom alive. I
remember one day last winter, I was going up to the school for a
meeting with her. She said I could catch part of her class. Municipal
institutions in the early part of the twentieth century—the mayoralty,
the corrupt officials of Tammany Hall, the city jails and courthouses.
Of course I was intrigued, so I made a point of getting there in time
to walk in and sit in the back of the classroom."

"Busman's holiday," Mike said, opening drawers and examining their
contents.

"Lola lured me right into that one." I smiled, remembering the day.
"She'd spent the week on the politics of Gentleman Jimmy Walker, the
mayor of New York City in the late 1920s. But she had a unique method
of showing the students the tone of the period. She was parading around
the podium, doing a perfect imitation of Mae West, describing the
actress's arrest and prosecution for the stage performance of her
play—called
Sex
—in 1926. She was reading from West's
autobiography, describing the condition of the prison cell in the
Tombs, and how the confused, diseased women were herded inside like
animals."

"A bleeding heart, under all that flesh, you're gonna tell me."

I ran my finger across the spines of a row of books, checking the
titles and noting that most in that section were treatises about
nineteenth- and twentieth-century government in New York City, which
was her specialty. "She ended by describing how the jail system was run
by greedy and stupid civil servants, worse than the prisoners. She
looked over the heads of her students and quoted West right to me.
'Humanity had parked its ideals outside.'"

"Staged just for you?"

"I was there to make her understand how important it was to
prosecute Ivan, and she wanted me to know that she wasn't about to see
him stuck in a jail cell. The typical ambivalence of a survivor of
domestic abuse."

Chapman lifted the dust ruffle to look under the bed and continued
to poke around the room.

"Doesn't sound like scholarship to me. Sounds like two-bit,
second-class theatrics. Same kind she went for with those Jersey
jerk-off prosecutors yesterday."

"She was capable of both. I'll give you some of her published
articles to read. You'll like her writings about the Civil War period
and the Draft Riots." Mike knew more about military history than anyone
I had ever met and read extensively on the subject.

"Save 1863 for another day and transport yourself back to the
twenty-first century."

Mike was impatient with my diversion, with good reason, and I turned
away from the bookshelves and moved on to the desk. "The computer?"

"Leave it alone. Jimmy Boyle's coming to pick it up tomorrow."

Boyle headed our cybercop squad and was a genius at retrieving files
and information that literally, to my view, were lost in space.

The rest of the desktop was a maze of spiral notepads, computer
disks, phone messages dated three and four months earlier, which
detectives would scour in the days to come, and small framed
photographs. I recognized a young Lola in her cap and gown, at what
must have been her graduation from Barnard, and then a Dakota family
shot of more current vintage, taken in front of her sister Lily's home
in Summit.

There was a black knit cardigan sweater over the back of the desk
chair. "Any idea what she was wearing today?" I asked.

Mike called to George, but he hadn't seen the body either, so Mike
added that question to the list he had started in the memo pad he kept
inside his blazer. "They'll have it inventoried at the ME's office in
the morning. Then I've got to check with the sister to see if the
clothes she had on when she died are the same ones she left Jersey
with."

I used my forefinger to pull at the pocket on the chest of the
sweater. "Hey, Mike, want to take out this piece of paper?"

I didn't want to be responsible for touching anything that might
raise an issue of chain of custody. For all intents and purposes, I
wasn't there tonight. He slid his gloved fingers in and came up with a
folded page from a telephone pad printed with the words
king's college
at the top,
and beneath that, the single handwritten notation, in bold print:

THE DEADHOUSE

Below the words was a list of four numbers: 14 46 63 85.

Mike read the words aloud. "Mean anything to you? A person? A place?"

I shook my head.

"Probably what the other tenants will start calling this building,"
George said.

"Is that her writing?"

I had seen enough of her correspondence to recognize it at once.
"Yes. Any date on it?"

"Nah. I'll voucher the note and the clothing. When we go to Jersey,
remember to ask the sister if she can tell us whether Lola had this
sweater there with her yesterday."

I opened the closet door and we poked around the contents. An
ordinary mix of skirts and slacks, dresses and blouses, sizes
consistent with Lola's large chest and slim hips.

"What do you know about a boyfriend?" George called out to me from
the second bedroom.

"News to me." I closed the closet and went into the smaller room.

There was a couch and a chair, and George was standing in front of a
chest of drawers, having pulled open each of the three levels. He was
dangling a pair of Jockey shorts on the end of his pen. "Get me some
bags from the kitchen. Let's see if we can find out who Mr. Size 40,
Briefs-Not-Boxers, might be."

Mike noticed the end of a striped sheet sticking out below the edge
of the couch. He threw the cushions onto the floor and rolled out the
metal frame of the sleep sofa. He stripped the sheets off the narrow
mattress and folded the top and bottom ones separately. "Let's see if
the lab comes up with any love juice." He wrapped each one in an
ordinary brown paper bag, to avoid contamination from one surface to
another, and because sealing damp materials in plastic could cause them
to deteriorate.

George chuckled. "So much for the mayor's theory that she threw
herself in the elevator shaft 'cause she was so despondent about having
Ivan arrested. Peterson told me the first thing I had to look for in
here was a suicide note. Damn, seems like she squeezed in one last
fling before it was lights out."

"Let's just leave this all here and send a team in for the morning
with an Evidence Recovery Unit. Someone needs to go through this
stuff," Chapman said, waving his hand at the several pieces of men's
clothing hanging in this room's closet. "Got to check the labels, look
for ID. It'll take hours. We'll just seal off the apartment now and
have them put a uniformed post outside the door for the night."

"Any mail here?" I was taking one more look around as I put on my
coat.

"No. The brother-in-law said all her mail was being forwarded to her
office at school, then she went through it there. We'll have to pick it
up tomorrow."

"Fat chance. I've had dealings with the legal departments, both at
Columbia and at King's. I can only tell you that if Sylvia Foote gets
to Lola's office first, everything will be so sanitized that you'll
think it had been swept by a CIA operative. Never a trace of Professor
Dakota."

Foote was the general counsel of King's College, having served in
the same post at Columbia for more than a quarter of a century. She
would opt for protecting the institution every chance she had.

"You know her personally?"

"Yeah. And she's like fingernails on a chalkboard. 'Don't disturb
the students' is her mantra, but what she really means is that the
university's golden rule is not to scare the parents. Nobody paying
those tuition rates wants his kids to go to a school where there might
be a hint of scandal. We'd better try to get in there as fast as we
can."

Chapman called the two-six and asked the desk sergeant for an extra
body to sit on the door of 15A. Then we said good night to George and
retraced our steps downstairs and out the rear door of the building,
around to Riverside Drive, where the car was parked.

As we let the engine warm up, I reached for the radio and moved the
dial to 1010 WINS, the all-news station, to see when this arctic front
would pass through the city. I caught the tail end of the traffic
cycle, warning about icy patches on the bridges leading in and out of
town, and shivered again at the top of the early morning news.

"This just in: the body of a Yale University senior, missing from
her New Haven dormitory since the day after Thanksgiving, was found
shortly after midnight, floating in the Hudson River, near the
promenade off Battery Park City. The content of the letters left behind
by Gina Norton have not been released to the press, but police sources
say that there are no signs of foul play."

"So much for my mother's theory that the school yard was a safer
place to be than the streets—one more corpse tonight, we'll have a hat
trick. And how handy for Hizzoner. No foul play declared before she's
even been dried off, thawed out, and taken apart by the medical
examiner," said Chapman, flipping off the radio, turning on the
headlights, and easing out of the parking space to take me home.

4

I heard
The New York Times
slam against my apartment door
at six-thirty, flung there by the porter who distributed the papers
throughout the building every morning. Drops of water from my hair,
still wet from the shower, dripped onto the front page as I leaned over
to pick it up and check the headlines for the story of Lola Dakota's
death.

Three pages back in the Metro section was a photo of Lola, standing
at a lectern in full academic dress, mortarboard atop her head. The
caption read "University Professor Dies in Bizarre Accident," above a
subheading printed in smaller type describing her as a "Witness for the
Prosecution." The reporter had managed to incorporate every
stereotypical expression of reaction into his brief story. The
administration was shocked and saddened by news of the beloved
professor's death, students were puzzled by the ironic twists of fate
in Dakota's final days, and her husband's family was outraged at
charges that he was alleged to have been involved in the thwarted plot
to kill her.

The phone rang and Chapman gave me the morning weather report.
"You're gonna need a dogsled to get downtown this morning. The streets
are coated with ice and the windchill brings it down to about five
degrees. I'm on my way home to catch a few hours' sleep."

"Anything develop during the rest of the tour?"

"Nope. Made the usual notifications, took care of all the paperwork,
got the preliminary reports down on the chief of detectives' desk so
he's in the know first thing he walks in. Subway's the only way to go
today, kid, much as you hate it. The driving is treacherous. See you
around lunchtime."

I finished dressing and reluctantly headed for the Sixty-eighth
Street Lexington Avenue station, anxious to beat the rush hour crowds.
Once settled into my seat, I scoped out the other passengers and sat
back to read the rest of the newspaper. It was early enough so that
most of my companions appeared to be people going to their jobs and
offices. A bit later and too many of the riders who stayed on board
south of Forty-second Street would also be on their way to the
courthouse, to make appearances for their criminal cases. On those
occasional days that I got on the train at nine o'clock, it was an
eerie feeling as we looked each other over for the last ten minutes of
the ride, knowing at a glance—the closer we all got to the Canal Street
station—that we were combatants on opposite sides of the battle.
Usually, I preferred to drive to work.

The cold air bit at my cheeks as I reached the top step of the
subway exit and turned south for the short walk to Hogan Place,
fighting the strong wind as I walked carefully around icy patches on
the sidewalk. The guy inside the small pushcart on the corner closest
to the office saw me coming and readied a bag with two large black
coffees.

I scanned my identification tag into the turnstile, greeted the
uniformed cop who sat at the security desk, and got on the elevator
with a few other lawyers from the staff. I stuck my head in at the
press office around the corner from my own desk to remind the assistant
to include Dakota's story and obituary in the clips she was preparing
for the district attorney to read. Each morning, Brenda Whitney's aides
combed the
Times
and the tabloids, the local and national
papers, cutting and compiling all the stories related to our cases or
to crime stories that might be of interest to Paul Battaglia and his
executive staff.

Before I could remove my coat and boots, Pat McKinney stood in the
doorway, resting a hand on the back of my secretary's, Laura's, empty
chair. "Lost a big one last night, huh?"

I tried not to let my intense dislike for McKinney, who was deputy
chief of the trial division and one of the supervisors to whom I
answered, affect my response. "After all that woman had been through,
you might think about putting it in terms of
her
life, not
mine."

"Lucky for us it didn't happen on
your
turf. Pretty
clever sting they pulled off in New Jersey with the fake hit. How come
you weren't so creative with the case?"